White House Wants To Kill WFIRST – Again
NASA Agency Budget Fact sheet
“The Budget proposes to terminate the WFIRST mission and instead focus on completing the delayed James Webb Space Telescope. The Budget also proposes to terminate two Earth science missions (PACE and CLARREO-Pathfinder).”
That sucks, although I could see how they’d be reluctant to start up another big telescope project when the last one turned into a many-years-and-billions-of-extra-dollars past due projects. What guarantees do we have that it will be delivered on time and in budget?
It also put pressure on the JWST project. The message, as I see it, not that WFIRST won’t happen. It’s that WFIRST won’t happen until JWST is up and operating.
That could be a correct interpretation since they actually spell out something similar to that for SLS, saying essentially get Block 1 and Orion up and running and then we’ll think about funding Block 1B.
I don’t think that’s the message. Zeroing out a program means the team disappears, the design and technology development work stops. You can’t just stop work and then assume you can start it again, right where you left off, years later. If you were correct, the budget would keep WFIRST on life support for a time, not kill it.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic but it’s the mixed message in the budget statement that makes me think that they aren’t intent on actually killing it but are expecting a compromise similar to what you are suggesting, although that would mean a delay of a few years. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be a good time to try and get full funding for another space telescope while JWST drags on.
Well, not exactly. The centers are pretty adept at rebranding things as “technology development” under different programs. SIRTF stayed on life support for years that way after being canceled.
You can stop work and restart it years later. With considerable extra work and expense. It’s inefficient and a generally bad idea, but it’s been done before. Also, I’m fairly sure more than one person was involved in writing that budget proposal. In fact, more than one organization. Office of Management and Budget has a lot of input. Some people there might actually believe you can stop work, and start up again, three years later, without extra expenses.
I think a lot of us (including in the astrophysics community) want to see WFIRST launch.
But it simply can’t turn into another JWST. The White House may not be able to kill it, but it might force more severe cost containment on it.
I don’t see either Wfirst or PACE being cut. Wfirst appears to be on a much better engineering and fiscal track than JWST ever was.
Worst case will be that the funding for Wfirst will remain flat until JW is off the ground. With a pushed-out 2026 launch date.
I just heard on the news (ABC radio) that the SLS Block 1B had it’s funding cut too. The report said the SLS Block1 was funded but not the Block 1B. I don’t remember hearing about a Block 1B. That’s why it caught my attention.
I wonder if that’s a foreshadowing of the future of the SLS.
I won’t comment on the foreshadowing question since this is a thread about WFIRST, but the terminology in the budget request is different, it “defers” funding for SLS Block 1B whereas it proposes to “terminate” WFIRST, stating, “the Administration is not ready to proceed with another multi-billion-dollar space
telescope”. Which as fcrary pointed out sounds sort of like deferred, albeit with more harsh wording which presumably is pointed more towards JWST.
Humankind is actually finding answers to some of the deepest questions about the Universe. We are finding that on the most fundamental level the answers about existence and meaning are intertwined and are out there, waiting for observation. The future will be incredibly grand. If there is to be a future for mankind, traveling in outer space to far-off places, the necessary, and unseen, methods of controlling the huge required energy levels will be the result of research into the fundamental nature of…nature.
Consider what has happened, and the breadth of it, in one small part of the field: when I was in elementary school, the notion that the Milky Way and the Universe are synonymous was passing, but within memory. Decades later, COBE, and other projects, show us pictures of the Universe barely 300,000 years old. Add so many more important projects that discover gravitational waves, confirm frame dragging to many decimal places…and I could go on. It is a rich time for both experimentalists and theoreticians (although I’m not sure what to make of Brian Greene…).
It is also a rich time for anyone interested in following this important work, as published volumes make research accessible.
Cosmology is the Queen of the Sciences.
Thankfully, the president’s budget proposal en toto is little more than a kid’s Christmas wish list. Congress decides the funding priorities and appropriates , and all fiscal bills begin in the House …. Nancy Pelosi’s house.
NASA’s FY19-20 budget actually went up, not down , as Trump proposed last time around. He also seems to be deferring to VP Pence on matters of spaceflight , if that offers any amount of encouragement.